The White House Equal Pay Pledge, which was earlier launched this year at United State of Women Summit to narrow the wage gap , now has 39 new signatories to promote equal pay which includes Redmond’s Microsoft. With the main objectives to ensure fair pay among all Americans that in turn attracts the great talents, the pledge mainly aims to have companies perform annual salary analysis, review hiring processes and promotions equally by gender and profession. Amazon and Expedia were the early bird signatories to shake hands with the pledge when it was first announced.
White House Equal Pay Pledge
Nearly Half of the U.S labor force is made up by women with more women taking equal positions in the field occupied by men earlier. The analysis shows that “in 2014, the typical woman working full-time all year in the United States earned only 79 percent of what the typical man earned working full-time all year.
The pay gap is even greater for African-American and Latina women, with African American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man. The gender wage gap continues to be a very real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families”.
Accenture, Airbnb, Amazon, Staples and more are some of the big companies that have signed the pledge along with Microsoft helping in reducing the national wage gap. With this initiative, it is most likely that all the corporations will join the bandwagon and hopefully this will also be the case with the much smaller companies.
Read more about it here.
So pledges will work but not these laws and measures over the last century:
-The national War Labor Board mandated during World War I that if women must undertake work normally done by men, they should earn equal pay for that work
-President Einsenhower’s equal-pay urging in his 1956 State of the Union Address
-The 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act
-Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
-The 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act
-Affirmative action (created for blacks but has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – tinyurl.com/74cooen)
-The 1991 amendments to Title VII
-The 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act
-The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act
-The Age Discrimination in Employment Act
-The Americans with Disability Act (Title I)
-Workplace diversity
-The countless state and local laws and regulations
-The thousands of company mentors for women
-The horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
-TV’s and movies’ last three decades of casting women as thoroughly integrated into the world of work (even in the ultra-macho world of spying, James Bond’s boss is a woman)
-The National Labor Relations Act
-The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2009, after he campaigned repeatedly on a promise to close the gender wage gap, but failed even though for his first two years of his presidency the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives
Most feminist activists and other women’s advocates seem to believe employers are fiercely determined to pay women less than men for the same work.
Yet they also seem to think employers’ prime modus operandi is greed. (“Corporate greed” is perhaps one of their most salient rallying calls.) Thus they no doubt believe employers would hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it (many do get away with it), or would move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money, or would replace old workers with young ones for the same reason.
So why do these same feminist activists and women’s advocates think employers would NOT hire only women if, as they say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Many of America’s most sophisticated women choose to earn less than their male counterparts:
“Female physicians worked about 5 hours fewer per week than their male counterparts through age 54….” https://www.aamc.org/download/426242/data/ihsreportdownload.pdf?cm_mmc=AAMC-_-ScientificAffairs-_-PDF-_-ihsreport
“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm
“…[O]nly 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time.” It “is not surprising that women are not showing up more often in corporations’ top ranks.” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/why-women-are-leaving-the-workforce-in-record-numbers/
“Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable” http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/15/1502567112.full.pdf
From:
“Salary Secrecy — Discrimination Against Women?” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/salary-secrecy-discrimination-against-women/